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Photography

Travel the World Through the Bizarre and Unexpected Sights of ‘Wonders of Street View’

A man with three legs, a vintage car scaling a building, and an unsettling formation of people donning bird masks are a few of the scenarios highlighted in the terrifically bizarre Wonders of Street View. One of the many sites of coder Neal Agarwal, the project showcases photographs of offbeat landmarks, digital glitches, chance encounters, and people who prepare to pose for the famous camera-laden Google Street View cars as they drive by. The playful platform is similarly interactive to allow viewers to explore the surroundings and generates scenes at random, taking visitors from San Francisco to Hesse, Germany, to Samburu, Kenya. Head to Wonders of Street View to traverse the globe one strange sight at a time. (via Waxy)

 

Art

Google Builds a Digital Reproduction of the National Museum of Brazil After its Tragic Destruction

Following a devastating fire this September, Google has released a virtual tour of the National Museum of Brazil, the country’s oldest natural history institution. The digital recreation is presented by Museum View (which uses the same functionality as Google Street View), and allows visitors to explore the institution’s key artifacts as they were displayed before this year’s tragic destruction. The online tour includes a view of Luzia (the oldest skeleton found in the Americas), 3000-year-old Brazilian ceramics, a collection of butterflies and moths currently under threat for extinction, and the museum’s mummified cat.

It’s estimated that the museum lost up to 92.5 percent of its 20 million artifacts in the fire—global relics, pottery, and animal specimens that had been collected by the institution since its founding in 1818. Its digital remains are the result of a collaborative project between the museum and Google, which began in 2016. Despite the horrific loss, the museum’s director Alexander Kellner expresses strength and hope for the institution’s future in a letter in Google’s Arts and Culture section. “It is important to stress that the National Museum, despite having lost a significant part of its collection, has not lost its ability to generate knowledge!”

You can view the full digital archive of the museum in Google’s virtual tour, and learn more about the museum’s history in Kellner’s full letter.  You can view a preview of the collections’s highlights in the video below. (via Artsy)

Art

Archiving the World’s Saddest Destinations Via Google Maps

On a platform filled with glamorous travel images from across the globe, Australian artist Damien Rudd’s account @sadtopographies contributes quite the opposite. Rudd finds the most depressing sounding rivers, lakes, and roads via Google Maps, screenshotting and posting their sad names for his audience of 64,000 followers. Each of his finds are extremely humorous, yet beg us to wonder what series of events could have possibly lead to their naming.

In case you wanted to match your winter mood to “Despair Island” rather than some white sand beach off of the coast of Bali, head over to Rudd’s Instagram for a dose of Suffering St. and Broken Dreams Dr. (via Booooooom)

Amazing Design Photography

You Can Now Explore the World’s Largest Train Set Using Google Street View

If you’re ever in Hamburg, Germany, be sure to join the million annual visitors who stop by Miniatur Wunderland, the largest continuous train set in the world. The huge train set fills several large rooms and contains over 8 miles of tracks that move 900 trains through themed dioramas of cities and other locations around the world like Scandinavia, Hamburg, Bavaria, and Switzerland. If you can’t make it Hamburg, here’s the next best thing: Google just photographed the entire thing and shared it on Google Street View so you can explore it from the perspective of a teeny tiny person.

Google recorded 9 areas of the Miniatur Wunderland system from multiple angles, and you can drop in just like on Google Maps and explore everything at a 360° angle. Watch the video below to get a better sense of how this whole thing is setup.

 

Photography

Earth View: A Curated Selection of the Most Striking Satellite Images Found on Google Earth

Earth View is a giant collection of 1,500 curated images that represent the most striking images found through Google Earth. You can can click or swipe randomly through the far flung reaches of the planet as captured from satellites as captured from the world. All the images are available as wallpaper images for mobile and desktop, and they even have a Chrome app that loads a random image for each new tab. See also: Aerial Wallpapers. (thnx, Xavier!)

Art

Explore the Past and Present of Street Art Around the World with Google Street Art

Google’s Street View, made possible by their custom-designed panoramic camera, has become the eyes of streets large and small in almost every major city. So it makes perfect sense that they’re now pointing their panoramic lenses to the walls around the world by adding street art to their portfolio. Earlier this week Google announced the launch of their Street Art Project, a new initiative to document and preserve the often transient nature of street art. The project launched with over 5,000 high resolution images including work that no longer exists, like the 5Pointz murals in Long Island City or the walls of the Tour Paris 13. (via Laughing Squid)